Wallenda's next stage: Hellhole Bend

Saturday

Jun 8, 2013 at 11:51 PM

1,300 feet from earth to earth. 1,500 feet down to the riverbed.

By BILLY COX

To get a peek at Nik Wallenda's next death-defying stage, start in the middle of nowhere and turn west onto Highway 64. Twenty or so miles shy of Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, 5,000 feet above sea level in Navajo country, hang a right off the blacktop at Mile Marker 280.

Shift the SUV into four-wheel drive and follow this otherwise unmarked, stomach-sloshing, chassis-battering, sun-blistered path of sharp limestone knees and elbows for a mile or so. Park just outside the propwash radius of a helicopter preparing to make another short supply run across a gorge you can't yet see. The chopper's destination, from this angle, is depthless and wallpaper-flat.

But stroll as close to the ungirded cliff as you dare, and its breathtaking scale sharpens amid bristling canyon winds.

Directly before you, to the north and separated by roughly 1,300 feet of thin air, sits a behemoth of a butte, where the drilling is already underway. Its bald summit stretches for maybe a quarter-mile sideways and is

insurmountable except by air. The baking mud of the Little Colorado River lies some 1,500 feet below.

The chopper scatters stinging debris as it ascends to sling-load a propane tank onto this unlikeliest of entertainment platforms.

On June 23 — two days after the summer solstice, on the evening of a supermoon, without a net or a safety harness — Wallenda will taunt the laws of gravity and attempt to wirewalk from way over yonder to the lip of the south rim beneath your boots.

His potential Discovery Channel audience: some 1.3 billion people.

On topographical maps, where the Little Colorado wishbones around this island of towering rock, the area is known as Hellhole Bend. Given the devout Christianity espoused by the Sarasota aerialist in his just-released autobiography, the showdown comes right out of the You Can't Make This Stuff Up file.

Just up the road, at the Grand Canyon's formal boundaries, the National Park Service wants nothing to do with it.

“This has no meaningful association with the park,” NPS public affairs officer Maureen Altrogge said about the Wallenda adventure, “and it doesn't further visitors' understanding of the mission of the National Park Service.

“In our opinion, being a part of something like this could cause confusion about what we're all about.”

On the other hand, the park needs no marketing strategy. Some 5 million gawkers a year breeze past craggy Hellhole Bend en route to the canyon's alpine panorama.

They come to explore the more majestic, 18-mile rim-to-rim vistas that can plunge a mile deep into the Earth's crust, where nearly 2 billion years of history are archived in sprawling cross-sections of basalt, limestone, sandstone, shale and quartz. So chronologically remote is its bedrock, its names are inspired by religious lore — Zoroaster Granite, Vishnu Shist.

Scientists have visited these libraries of stone to extract trilobite fossils from the floors of Cambrian oceans and extinct ferns from Devonian swamps.

'Over the Edge'

Despite the Grand Canyon's geological treasures, the question National Park Service rangers hear most often is lurid.

It is the one that has prompted Discovery Channel investors to sink a rumored $5 million into the Wallenda production: “How many people fall here each year?”

More to the point, argue authors Tom Myers and Michael Ghiglieri, what visitors really want to know is how many people die inside what they describe as “the most convoluted, massive, and jaggedly vertical landscape on Earth.”

In “Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon,” Myers and Ghiglieri comb through 10,000 years of sketchy records to document some 700 fatalities, losses that unfolded in myriad variations. This is an undercount, at least in part because no one bothered to tally death tolls until 1974.

But of course tourists ask about falling, because the sensation is universal and visceral. It visits us in weightless dreams and jolts us into midair collisions with gravity on the front end of slumber. Along the Colorado Plateau, where the Colorado River snakes its way across 277 miles of cracked earth, the real experience is never more than a few steps from the asphalt.

The park ledger is crammed with falls both freakish and unnecessary.

Imagine, in 1992, a father clownishly windmilling his arms from atop a rock wall to scare his daughter, only to vanish 400 feet down the abyss.

Consider, too, the two doomed boys, ages 8 and 15 months, who rolled to their deaths in 1958 when their father failed to secure a parking brake; the car exploded on impact at the bottom.

Some deaths are beyond irony: the 20-year-old who, in 1981, climbed over a guard wall to get a better photo of the rim, not the canyon, and backpedaled into oblivion.

Until now, though, none have has intentionally placed themselves in harm's way with more tenacity than Wallenda.

His performance will unfold where the Little Colorado pulls a southeast buttonhook away from federal property and into the hardscrabble terrain of a more receptive and desperate host — Navajo Nation. (More on those motivations later.)

Hellhole Bend is one of the Grand Canyon's 600 canyon tributaries, but “it's still part of the same geological system,” says “Over the Edge” co-author Ghiglieri.

“If it were located in Texas or Oklahoma, it'd be one of those ‘You gotta see this' places. But out here, it's just one more tributary.”

In fact, the dizzying butte is famous in fringe and commercial circles. You may have seen Hellhole Bend in ads, from Mercedes-Benz to battery manufacturers.

Or maybe you've seen footage of wing-suited base jumpers stunting in the vicinity. Last December, one Norwegian daredevil died nearby when his parachute failed to open.

“Base jumpers aren't like Nik, they don't do things by the rules; they like to sneak in and see if they can get away with it,” says Flagstaff location scout P.J. Connolly, who has introduced Wallenda, not to mention eight commercial clients, to the unique opportunities created by the bend's relatively narrow cliff walls.

“That's part of their rush.”

‘So peaceful and quiet'

Wallenda — whose acrobatics include hanging by his teeth from a helicopter or gunning a motorcycle up a steel cable — keeps a distance from the largely clandestine rule-bending stunt community.

“That's just not the way I work, nor would I ever consider it. Why would I break a law when I can change a law? I've already done that, in two countries,” he says, referring to last summer's historic Niagara Falls crossing.

In June 2012, Wallenda famously ignored calls from Canadian spectators — and perhaps his own inner voice — to shed a safety harness imposed on him by squeamish ABC executives during his New York-to-Canada skywalk at Horseshoe Falls. The 34-year-old funambulist is a stickler for playing it by the book.

But even though he will test the desert air without a tether, he will do so with a sense of compromise.

“My preference would be a longer walk — someday I'd like to walk a whole mile,” says Wallenda, who needed just 25 minutes to tread over Niagara Falls. “But I don't think any network wants to put that much time into covering a wirewalk.”

Still, Hellhole Bend will easily surpass Wallenda's 220-foot-high falls crossing as well as his personal best of 390 feet over downtown Fort Myers in 2010.

He sums up the distinction between the canyon and the falls with a flick of the wrist.

“I tossed a rock over the edge, and it took eight, nine seconds to hit the bottom.” Wallenda pauses, waiting for the smile to catch up. “That's a long time to think.”

But the desert aesthetic will differ from the roaring cascades of Horseshoe Falls — and its live audience of 110,000 cheering spectators — in more ways than one.

“The falls are so loud and energetic,” Wallenda says. “But this is very serene, so peaceful and quiet. Outside of my family, there really won't be anyone at the site, and that's kind of the way I want it.”

In fact, media coverage outside Discovery Channel's NBC production crew will be sequestered nearly a mile away, to the west, on rugged Navajo land. Regular spectators will not get even that close because of the lack of space and guard rails. They'll be positioned some 5 miles to the southeast, off Highway 64, where they can watch the drama play out live on a Jumbotron.

As the appointment with history closes in, it would appear that every precautionary detail has been addressed.

But Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly extends a wish beyond the realms of engineering and logistics: “Be safe and make sure everything's right and pray to the almighty that he makes it across safely,” he says.

“We should all pray for a nice day and no wind.”

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